The lady of the brown bungalow was, however, far more attractive than
her sister of the red one, and the Mandersons as a family were far
more appealing than the Redmonds. My note-book filled with memoranda
touching the ways and manners of the Mandersons, and most of these, I
must confess, related to Mrs. Manderson. She was exactly the type I
sought, the veritable _dea ex machina_ of the bungalow world. She lived
a good deal on her veranda, and as I had established a writing-table on
mine I was able to add constantly to my notes by the mere lifting of
my eyes. I excused my impudence in watching her on scientific grounds.
She was no more to me than a new bird to an ornithologist, or a strange
plant to a botanist.
Occasionally she would dart into the house and attack an upright piano
that stood by the broad window of the living-room. I could see the firm
clean stroke of her arms as she played. Those brilliant, flashing,
golden things of Chopin’s she did wonderfully; or again it would be
Schumann’s spirit she invoked. Once begun, she would run on for an
hour, and Banzai would leave his kitchen and crouch on our steps to
listen. She appeared at times quite fearlessly with a broom to sweep
the walk, and she seemed to find a childish delight in sprinkling the
lawn. Or she would set off, basket in hand, for the grocer’s, and would
return bearing her own purchases and none the less a lady for a’ that.
There was about her an indefinable freshness and crispness. I observed
with awe her succession of pink and blue shirt waists, in which she
caught and diffused the sun like a figure in one of Benson’s pictures;
and when she danced off with her card-case in a costume of solid white,
and with a flappy white hat, she was not less than adorable.
Manderson nodded to me the second day, a little coldly, as we met in
the walk; and thereafter bowed or waved a hand when I fell under his
eye. One evening I heard him calling her across the dusk of the yard.
Her name was Olive, and nothing, it seemed to me, was ever more fitting
than that.
One morning as I wrote at my table on the veranda I was aroused by
a commotion over the way. The girl of all work appeared in the front
yard screaming and wringing her hands, and I rushed across the lane
to learn that the water-heater was possessed of an evil spirit and
threatened to burst. The lady of the bungalow had gone to town and the
peril was imminent. I reversed all the visible valves, in that trustful
experimental spirit which is the flower of perfect ignorance, and
the catastrophe was averted. I returned to my work, became absorbed,
and was only aroused by a tug at my smoking-jacket. Beside me stood
the Manderson baby, extending a handful of dahlias! Her manner was
of ambassadorial gravity. No word was spoken, and she trotted off,
laboriously descended my steps, and toddled across the lane.
Her mother waited at the curb, and as I bowed in my best manner,
holding up the dahlias, she called, “Thank you!” in the most entrancing
of voices. Mr. James declares that the way one person looks at another
may be, in effect, an incident; and how much more may “Thank you,”
flung across a quiet street, have the weight of hours of dialogue!
Her voice was precisely the voice that the loveliest of feminine names
connotes, suggesting Tennysonian harmonies and cadences, and murmuring
waters of----
“Sweet Catullus’s all-but-island, olive-silvery Sirmio.”
A bunch of dahlias was just the epistolary form to which a bungalow
lady would resort in communicating with a gentleman she did not know.
The threatened explosion of the heater had thus served to introduce
me to my neighbor, and had given me at the same time a new revelation
of her sense of the proprieties, her graciousness, and charm. In my
visit to the house I had observed its appointments with a discreet but
interested eye, and I jotted down many notes with her dahlias on the
table before me. The soft tints of the walls, the well-chosen American
rugs, the comfort that spoke in the furniture reflected a consistent
taste. There was the usual den, with a long bench piled with cushions,
and near at hand a table where a tray of smoker’s articles was hedged
in with magazines, and there were books neatly shelved, and others,
lying about, testified to familiar use. The upright piano, by the
window of my frequent contemplation, bore the imprimatur of one of
the most reputable makers, and a tall rack beside it was filled with
music. Prone on the player’s seat lay a doll--a fact I noted with
satisfaction, as evidence of the bungalow baby’s supremacy even where
its mother is a veritable reincarnation of St. Cecilia.
The same evening Manderson came home in haste and departed immediately
with a suitcase. I had hoped that he would follow the dahlias in person
to discuss the housemaid’s embarrassments with the plumbing and bring
me within the arc of his domestic circle, but such was not to be the
way of it.
He was gone three days, and while the lady of the bungalow now bowed to
me once daily across the lane, our acquaintance progressed no further.
Nor, I may add, did my work move forward according to the schedule by
which it is my habit to write. I found myself scribbling verses--a
relaxation I had not indulged in since my college days. I walked much,
surveying the other streets in Sherwood Forest Addition and gloomily
comparing them with Landor Lane to their disadvantage. I tramped the
shore of the little lake and saw her there once and again, at play
with the baby. She and Mrs. Redmond exchanged visits frequently with
bungalow informality. One afternoon half a dozen young women appeared
for tea on the deep veranda, and the lane was gay with laughter. They
were the ladies of the surrounding bungalow district, and their party
was the merriest. I wondered whether she had waited for a day when her
husband was absent to summon these sisters. It was a gloomy fate that
had mated her with a melancholy soul like Manderson.